This zombie grammar school policy will only harm crisis-hit schools

Pupils at a grammar school in Yorkshire in 1956: the idea that only a small elite was suited to academic education is long outmoded.
Photograph: Joseph McKeown/Getty Images

It’s a mystery. In what are undeniably challenging times for schools, education secretary Damian Hinds last week had headteachers eating out of his hand with a major speech addressing concerns about school inspections, funding and workload.

This is the zombie policy that won’t die. The idea of creating new grammar schools, currently not permissible in law, was seen off at the last election by Theresa May’s lost majority. But creating more grammar school places, especially if they are on separate sites from existing schools – one of these has already opened 10 miles away from its home grammar school in Kent – could be equally damaging. Many fully comprehensive areas would feel the impact of what are effectively standalone schools eating into their catchment areas.

The arguments in favour of such a move are flimsy, often based on the anecdotes of a few high-profile public figures whose life chances were transformed by passing the 11-plus. But anecdote is not a good basis for hard policy, and the facts are clear. The majority of children in grammar schools have always come from better-off homes. This fact goes back to the 1959 Crowther report and, 60 years on, is reflected in the government’s own data, which shows that on average 3% of pupils in grammar schools come from poorer homes while the national average is around 14%.

The most recent analysis of the government’s extensive pupil datasets – by Durham University – reveals that in fact grammar schools add barely any value. Their stellar results simply reflect the higher prior attainment of their pupils. Since access to many grammar schools is now governed by industrial-scale private tuition, this may tell us more about parental bank balances than natural “ability”.

And therein lies the most objectionable aspect of selective education: the notion that intelligence, ability and human potential are rigidly fixed and can be reliably verified by one arbitrary test taken when some children have just turned 10 years old. The idea that there are “clever” children and the rest belongs to an era when it was taken for granted that only a small elite was suited to an academic education.

So why do it? In the past six months I have been researching a new book, The Best for My Child: Did the schools market deliver?, looking at education policy since the 1988 Education Reform Act, which ushered in the idea of parental choice, diversity and a quasi-market in which selective education has been allowed to flourish.

My overall conclusion is that the politicians are facing such monumental challenges in education that they either bury their heads in the sand or revert to small-scale gimmicks. Some of those market reforms – more accountability to parents, for example – had a positive impact on schools and encouraged the weaker schools to improve. But the schools market also entrenched an existing steep hierarchy in English education.

Popular schools haven’t expanded to accommodate all comers, as pure market advocates predicted. The use of overt and covert selection means some choices are available only to a select group of parents who can afford hefty fees, move to the catchment area of a successful school or afford private tuition to pass high-stakes entrance exams.

The often toxic relationship between parental choice, admissions practices, house prices and performance measures has led to alarming school-level segregation in some communities. This in turn affects social cohesion and pupil outcomes, as well as the ability of some schools to both compete in crude league table measures and recruit good staff.

In this context, the fact that the latest announcement is yet another attempt to tinker with the market – the £50m will apparently be conditional on grammar schools admitting handfuls of extra-low-income pupils – tells us how destitute the education policy debate really is.

Even the Labour party, currently conducting a policy consultation, has little to say on grammar schools or the market. One would have thought that at least its National Education Service would have the principle of fully comprehensive education – still the best way to combine choice with fairness and more equal outcomes – at its heart.

Campaigns against the new policy will no doubt get into gear, especially where expansion and grammar “annexes” are planned. But none of these is a substitute for radical reform to ensure the schools market does the best for all children, not just a few. Hinds almost convinced us he got that, then blew it.

The Best for My Child: Did the schools market deliver? by Fiona Millar is out next week (John Catt Educational, £14)